A skills matrix identifies the skills, knowledge, experience, and capabilities desired of a board to enable it to meet both its current and future challenges and realize its opportunities. Disclosing a skills matrix is good governance and offers an opportunity for considered reflection on whether the board has the right skills and diversity for providing guidance and oversight on sustainability.

In order to focus management behavior on capturing opportunities from sustainability and ensure that sustainability practices are adopted as everyday practice in decision making, Boards need to make management explicitly accountable for the company’s environmental and social impact. By aligning executive compensation with strategic sustainability targets and tying performance payouts to non-financial sustainability metrics, Boards can sharpen management’s focus on sustainability issues.

What gets measured, gets improved. Transparency on the material environmental, social, and governance performance results signals that it is monitoring progress toward sustainability goals. Best-in-class companies set short-term and long-term targets on material sustainability issues, report comprehensive results for their own operations with a geographical breakdown as well as across the value chain and evaluate their performance.

The board’s oversight role requires setting up an effective internal control mechanism, ensuring the independence of audit and strict compliance, monitoring ethics and business conduct within the company and its value chain, and transparency in external reporting and disclosure. Effective tracking of sustainability performance and communication to the board is essential for improving oversight of sustainability.

Many companies’ greatest sustainability risks and opportunities are in the supply chain. Leading companies in sustainability accept responsibility throughout their value chains and work with their suppliers to implement sustainability initiatives. This may involve utilizing their purchasing power to encourage, audit, collaborate with, and provide benchmarking and learning opportunities with its suppliers on key sustainability issues.

Managing your ecosystem includes taking responsibility for the environment, communities and networks in which the company operates. Ecosystem responsibility requires pursuing non-traditional partnerships between public, private and social spheres, or between competitors within the same industry to accelerate impact towards Sustainable Development Goals.

Integrating sustainability into the organization’s processes and culture requires a continuous learning climate. Lessons learned should be utilized to improve decision-making processes, skills gaps and required mindset changes need to be addressed through training and sustainability practices need to be integrated into the company’s culture.